So identifying at least seven or eight discrete pasture areas would allow enough recovery time to get through a year without damaging your land. The limits of six to 12 days depend on rainfall and season.Ī poultry pasture might only have enough to eat for six days during winter or during a summer drought, or 12 days during the optimal weather of the spring and fall.ĭepending on conditions, each pasture will need two or three months to recover-less when conditions are optimal. If you’re not intimidated by math, each pasture for 40 birds for six to 12 days would need to cover about 1,700 square feet-about the size of a small three-bedroom house. So if, like Shawn, you need a setup for 40 chickens, picture each pasture as big enough for a pajama party with 40 beds or a salvage yard jammed with 20 pickups. That’s about the size of the footprint of one queen-size bed per chicken.Īnother way to think about that is that the footprint of a mid-size pickup would be enough for two chickens. In warm, wet, sunny South Carolina, Jadrnicek figures that each hen needs about 43 square feet of poultry pasture to sustain it for six to 12 days. Additional species of plants can be sown either to enhance the chickens’ diet or to attract pollinators while the chickens are devouring other pastures. As he wrote in his book, “… instead of spending time and money mowing a polluting lawn, our foraging chickens convert our lawn into food and money.”Īnd just like a pasture-or a lawn-he maintains it with proper liming for pH. He figures he only spends eight hours per year (per year!) mowing small areas the chickens didn’t trim thoroughly. And it spares him the painful roar-and expense-of micromanaging a lawn mower. This provides about 30 percent of his chickens’ food supply. Instead of lawn, Jadrnicek plants poultry pastures that work on the same principle as rotational grazing for cattle. So why not kill two birds with one stone? Or to put it in less violent terms: Why not feed two or more birds with one great idea? Jadrnicek has a few acres in the country and decided he didn’t want to spend time mowing a lawn. Read more: Check out these three forages that pastured chickens absolutely love! You can find details on their system and other great innovations for the small farmer or homesteader in their book The Bio-Integrated Farm: A revolutionary permaculture-based system using greenhouses, ponds, compost piles, aquaponics, chickens and more.īut I’ll summarize their rotational “pasture pens” here. Fortunately, my colleagues-Shawn Jadrnicek and his wife, Stephanie-have confronted the same issues and come up with the kind of low-cost, low-maintenance, high-success system I can appreciate. Maybe a term such as “home-range” would be more accurate-meaning that we give the chickens special places where they can feel like they’re home-on-the-range and we feel like we’re home free.įor my tiny homestead on a 1/4-acre in downtown Durham, North Carolina, my wife and I enclosed a small area under a cluster of shrubs to create a home-range we call the Corral or the Forest Grove for our half-dozen hens.īut that wouldn’t be adequate for chicken-keepers with more land and more chickens. It’s not really free if you have to give up your free time to fix things. So perhaps the term “free-range” overpromises just a bit. I had to learn the hard way that allowing our chickens to free-range in the yard-as some experts advise-leads to my having to free-range the yard as well: removing poop from the patio, replacing mulch and replanting uprooted flowers.
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